Sammy Farha vs Jamie Gold

Watch part one of the above episode of High Stakes Poker if you have not yet seen it to see the pre flop action of this amazing hand between Jamie Gold and Sammy Farha. The preflop action is very important in this hand so make sure you watch it if you haven't seen it yet.

On my initial viewing of this hand I was sure that Farha let Gold off with the final bet as an act of charity in essence, out of the goodness of his heart. I watched the hand again to see if this was correct and I'm now convinced that Jamie's talk actually confused and put doubt into Sammy's head towards the end of the hand.

Before 4.10 in the timeline of the above video Sammy is convinced that Jamie has KK or QQ and is definitely going to bet the river. At around 4.10 or thereabouts Jamie says very convincingly that he has the best hand and that he is basically trying to save Sammy money. I think this is the point at which Sammy became very confused and doubtful over whether he definitely had the best hand and made the huge error of not betting the river.

What do you guys think? Kindness or Fear?

Serious Issue Resolved (Finally)

OK - a couple of weeks ago I had one of my poker accounts "compromised". Whoever accessed my account was in the process of trying to clear it out when I happened to try and log in at the same time.

Had it not been for that lucky coincidence I would have lost a lot more than the $30,000 they managed to lose playing on my account.

I managed to get the account frozen while they were playing on it and since then I have been involved in a complex investigation with the poker site in question to try and figure out how this happened which has taken a significant amount of time and effort on my part.

The issue was resolved today and my money has been refunded in full - hopefully they will be able to catch the person involved and bring criminal charges against him/her for the serious fraud that they have committed, possibly resulting in jail time...(with any luck).

We know where the hacker is from, including their I.P. address & for this reason I won't be naming the poker site or giving any more specific information regarding this issue in case it jeopardises their further investigations.

Now back to some Poker!!

"Its fairly obvious that anyone with a high profile is now a target. Players have a right to protection given the rake that we pay. Account passwords should be encrypted and never accessible to support staff. Support staff should not be allowed to change e-mail addys without manager sign-off. All clients should contain an "only allow log on from this computer" option."

I agree with the above comment wholeheartedly.